


more things in heaven and earth (than are dreamt of in your philosophy class)

by temerarious



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alien Biology, Eventual Keith/Shiro (Voltron), Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Happy Ending, Humor, Pre-Kerberos Mission, for now Keith just has a devastating crush
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 06:50:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21369946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/temerarious/pseuds/temerarious
Summary: As a favour to Shiro, Matt agrees to take sixteen-year-old Keith on as his roommate. As a favour to Keith, Matt doesn’t mention any of the bizarre things he witnesses to his friends in bio.Or, Keith has always been half Galra, and there were times it definitely showed.
Relationships: Keith & Shiro (Voltron), Matt Holt & Keith
Comments: 35
Kudos: 218





	more things in heaven and earth (than are dreamt of in your philosophy class)

The problem with being friends with Takashi Shirogane is that he’s a very nice man. This leads to him doing nice things for you, which in turn leads to you feeling obliged to do nice things for him in return. Even when those things include requesting Shiro’s bad news first-year protege as a roommate, concerned and ‘well-meaning’ faculty be damned. 

To be fair, Keith isn’t bad company, over all. He’s almost always quiet, and when he’s around, he’s usually just studying at his desk. He doesn’t play obnoxious music or wear smelly cologne or munch on crunchy snacks at all hours. You couldn’t accuse him of being tidy, exactly, but he’s pretty clean, and never slacks off when it’s his turn to clean their bathroom. 

About a quarter of the time, when Matt says he’s heading to the cafeteria, Keith gets up and joins him—not so often that Matt feels dogged, but more often than he would just to be polite. He sometimes even responds with a cautious, “I’m meeting Shiro in half an hour if you want to wait,” which is the absolute pinnacle of generosity coming from Keith, who, by and large, seems to value only sim hours, his hover bike, and time with Shiro.

As a delinquent, he’s something of a let down. He’s gotten into a few fights that Matt’s heard about, but mostly just keeps his head down. He hasn’t even fulfilled the baseline bad-boy roommate expectation and expanded Matt’s vocabulary of profanity. 

Or he hadn’t, until the day Matt wakes up to the sound of some _very_ creative swearing and the clang of knocked-over toiletries, muffled hardly at all by the bathroom door.

“Everything okay in there?” he calls out sleepily.

There’s a pause, then, “Yeah—yeah, ‘f course.”

Matt is a big brother. He has instincts for this. Everything is definitely not okay in there.

Teenagers are proud creatures. They’ve been known to suffer through everything from lost keys to fever-inducing infections in silence just to avoid admitting to a mildly embarrassing accident. Matt knows this because he is almost twenty now, thank god. Definitely not from any kind of personal experience whatsoever.

...He may at one point have worn shoes two sizes too small for a few months rather than admit to being wrong about them fitting, but that’s between him and his fucked up pinky toes.

The important point being that Keith might be in there bleeding or crying or thinking he’s caught the plague because of his first ever zit (genetics really could be very unfair). Matt has a duty to see him through this unscathed.

He swings his feet out of bed and marches over to the bathroom door, filled with noble purpose.

(Any blackmail gathered in the process will be purely incidental.)

“Sure, buddy. I’m coming in to get my contacts, okay?” Before Keith can warn him off, he pushes the door open and—

Well. Whatever he’d expected, it’s not what he gets.

“You don't wear contacts,” Keith accuses, quite fairly. 

The kid is neither injured nor trapped in a poorly-buttoned uniform nor exorcising his sorrows with a regrettable self-inflicted haircut. At first glance, he’s just brushing his teeth. Then Matt notices Keith’s left hand is cupped oddly, as if he’s holding something. It almost looks like—

“Are those _teeth_?”

Keith closes his hand tightly and shoves the fist into his pocket, eyes fixed on the sink in a glare. “Don’t worry about it, it’s fine.” 

As he speaks, Matt’s eyes are drawn to his mouth, to two little gaps where his canines should be that definitely weren’t there at dinner yesterday.

“Oh my god, they’re _your_ teeth. How did you manage to knock two teeth out alone in a bathroom at six in the morning?”

God, he hasn’t been sneaking out for crack-of-dawn brawls, has he? Letting that kind of behaviour fly under the radar definitely constitutes a violation of Matt’s vague agreement to ‘keep an eye out’ for Shiro’s new buddy.

Keith is clearly not on the same page as Matt. He seems more defensive at being caught than worried about his newly gap-toothed grin. 

“It’s not a big deal,” he says, rinsing his toothbrush. Then, improbably, “It’s happened before.”

“It’s happened before?” Matt echoes weakly.

“Yeah. Sometimes they fall out.”

“Those are false teeth?”

“No?” Keith looks confused now. He puts his toothbrush away in the cup and actually looks at Matt for the first time this morning. Hesitantly, he pulls his upper lip back with a finger to show the spaces. 

Matt almost flinches back—bloody gums are gross even when they’re yours, but that’s not what he’s looking at. The gums where Keith’s canines used to be are a little red and irritated, but they aren’t bare spaces at all. Both sides have little white nubs of new, emerging tooth showing, definitely more in line with a kid who’s lost just lost some milk teeth than a teen who knocked his own teeth out against the shower tile or something.

“Huh,” Matt manages.

“There.” Keith drops his hand and crosses his arms, one hand still a fist gripping his lost teeth. “They always grow back in, so it’s not a big deal. It happens to sharks too, I guess, so it’s not weird.”

Matt's heard better defenses against weirdness, but that actually rings a bell, and not just from Shark Week.

“You know, I think I’ve heard of this before? For human people, I mean, not sharks.”

A brief internet search later, and he waves Keith over to join him at his computer and see the results. The kid still looks wary, but he puts his ex-teeth down on the desk once he comes over, so that’s something. A little gross, but something.

“See?” Matt says. “There’s even a word for it: ‘hyperdontia.’ And the extra teeth are ‘supernumerary’” He clicks through the article, and winces. “Oof, looks like it can land you with a real set of snaggle teeth. Though…” He reaches for Keith’s jaw and waggles it back and forth until he opens his mouth, glaring. “Yeah, looks like you’ve avoided that so far. Huh. You really should probably still see a dentist, though.”

He wiggles Keith’s jaw one more time, just ‘cause, then lets go.

“Congratulations, you aren’t a secret human/shark hybrid the government has been keeping under wraps after all.”

“I never thought that.” He sounds a little relieved, though. He reaches out to rest his hand on Matt’s shoulder in thanks—a gesture straight out of Shiro’s playbook and so obviously a learned behaviour that it’s somehow even more endearing—and then scoops the teeth off the desk to drop them in the wastebasket. 

Wait.

Matt gapes. “What are you doing?”

Keith shrugs. “If there’s nothing wrong, I don’t need them to show a doctor. Why would I keep them?”

Matthew Holt grew up in a household visited regularly by the Tooth Fairy. Matthew Holt has a baby sister who’d made detailed and very conniving plots to catch said Tooth Fairy every time she lost another tooth. Matthew Holt had once spent a very rewarding weekend with the aforementioned baby sister submerging their carefully preserved baby teeth (returned to them when the so-called Tooth Fairy otherwise known as Dad had been caught and brought to justice for crimes against childhood scientific curiosity) in various different acidic solutions to see what would happen. 

Yeah. Mom hadn’t been too happy about that last one, but neither of them had asked her to buy soda at the store ever, ever again, so at least there was that.

Still, the point remains—“You don’t just _throw your baby teeth away_,” he exclaims.

“They aren’t my baby teeth anyway. I’m sixteen.” A fair point. “What would I even do with them?”

Matt doesn’t know what to say to that. Come home with me next weekend, my sister and I’ll show you how to send your old canines off in style?

Well.

Actually, why not?

“Hey, Matt—”

“I don’t get it,” says Katie. “That should be a deadly tooth-and-acid smoothie by now. How is it just… sitting there? It’s been hours.”

“Maybe we didn’t mix it right? Or it came in contact with a base by accident? But that’s not possible in the first place with Caro’s Acid. Here, I’ll dip this stick in to che—oh my god!”

Matt drops the stick hastily as their small home-brewed beakerful of corrosive explodes. The force of the tiny blast propels the shatterproof beaker backwards to land on its side with a rattling noise. When Matt cautiously hooks a new stick into the blackened beaker, a charred, but somehow still completely intact tooth falls out onto the workbench with a little _plink_.

“_How_,” says Katie.

“Hey Matt,” Keith says again. “Your mom’s calling us in for dinner.”

“…Right.”

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first time posting anything anywhere in more than four years, yikes! I reply to comments, and I'm @temerarious_ on [twitter](https://twitter.com/temerarious_) if you want to come talk Voltron/Sheith/whatever!


End file.
